Web of Doubt
by Ellynne
Summary: When a Spinnetod is accused of murder, Mr. Gold decides to get her off.


I do not own Grimm, Once Upon a Time, or Charlotte's Web.

X

 _'Well,' he thought, 'I've got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty - everything I don't like.'_  
\- E.B. White, _Charlotte's Web_.

X

The man seated at the desk, waiting patiently for the police officer to help him, was smaller than Wu with a thin, twig-like body. When the man looked up at him, Wu noticed his eyes were a warm brown, the kind that should have inspired trust and sympathy. Maybe even comparisons to lost puppies.

Instead, when he looked at Wu, the policeman felt cold wash through him. The man seemed to know it, too. The corner of his mouth quirked up in just the tiniest hint of a smirk. _I own you,_ that look said.

"The finger?" the man said.

"E-excuse me?"

"The finger, the one recovered from the Showalter murder? I need to see it."

"You need to _see_ it?"

The cold eyes that should have been warm turned scornful. Wu felt his stomach twist. It was hard not to feel like a little child again, listening to his grandmother's stories and being warned of the things that ate naughty children who didn't do as they were told. . . .

"I'm Ms. Marcinko's lawyer. As her lawyer, I need to see the evidence against her. The finger is evidence. I trust you can connect the dots?"

Wu nodded quickly and made a couple calls. Unfortunately, the finger was still down in the morgue. That meant it was still under his department's jurisdiction, not cold storage. _That_ meant, when Wu called ahead, he was told the lawyer could come look, but Wu would need to escort him and keep an eye on him. Apparently, it wasn't enough for a man to sign a paper saying he'd received a finger and for someone else to sign when he'd given the finger back. The lawyer said he understood. He got up, grasping a gold-handled cane. He moved so smoothly, it took Wu a moment to realize the cane wasn't an affectation. The man was lame.

As a part of his job, Wu had long since fallen into the habit of sizing up people if it came to a fight. Objectively, there was nothing dangerous about this man. He was shorter than Wu and looked as if a good wind would scatter him like so many leaves. He was about as threatening as a snowflake in July.

Or he should have been. Snakes were lame, too, and that was what the man made Wu think of, a serpent moving gracefully, delicately fragile in appearance but full of coiled strength and waiting for the moment to strike. The small ones always had the worst venom.

Dr. Harper was doing paperwork instead of an autopsy when they came in, Wu was glad to see. Wu had a strong stomach (it came with the job) but he was never going to have Harper's nonchalant attitude to all things grim and goriful.

Her face lit up when she saw him. "Drew, good to see you! What did you need to see the Showalter finger for?"

"He doesn't," the man said. "Hello, Doctor . . . Harper, is it? I'm Mr. Gold, a lawyer. Lena Marcinko is my client. May I see the appendage, please?"

As expected, there was paperwork to be handed back and forth, forms to be signed off on before a thick, plastic bag was handed over and the lawyer was given the finger (Wu had going to remember to put it that way when he told the story later). Gold asked questions about how it was being stored and protected. What tests had been done? He nudged it through its wrappings. For a second, Wu could have sworn it twitched. He gasped, jumping back.

"Something wrong?" Dr. Harper asked.

"It—it moved!"

Dr. Harper rolled her eyes. "You're letting your imagination run away with you, Drew. Although, Mr. Gold, I'd appreciate it if you didn't play with the remains."

"Not even knucklebones? That was a favorite game when I was a child."

"Knucklebones?" Wu choked. This really was sounding like one of his grandmother's tales.

"It's a game," Harper told him. She didn't roll her eyes but she might as well have. "You play it with jacks."

"Or with bones," Gold said. "That's how it got its name, centuries ago. Shepherds played it with sheep bones. Of course, in children's stories, ogres—and imps—played with men's bones." He turned his attention back to Dr. Harper. "I'm going to need DNA tests done, comparing this to my client's. And I need you to rerun the fingerprint analysis."

"The fingerprint matched your client's," Wu said.

"Yes, it matched a finger which is already firmly attached to my client's hand. Don't you see something wrong with that?"

"Uh. . . ."

"It's estimated that fingerprints are one in a billion," Harper said. "By those numbers, there could be six people out there with the same print. Sounds like a longshot, but is that what you're trying to prove? Show that the DNA doesn't match?"

The lawyer gave her tight-lipped smile, which was good. If he'd showed his teeth, Wu realized he might have broken and run. "Oh, no," Gold said. "I'm hoping it's exactly the same."

X

The evidence was simple but convincing. Lena only had to show her hands to the judge. There were a few questions after that, but admitting she didn't know was enough.

Yes, her mother was dead and not available to give testimony. No, her mother had never said anything to make Lena think she wasn't an only child. She _had_ been born at home. Her father was gone long before that. Yes, money had been a problem. . . .

He didn't know and didn't ask about _Spinnetods_ , not that she would have told him.

 _Spinnetods_ were almost always only children. The same drive that pushed them to kill to live pushed them to kill to create life, to kill the fathers of their children. It was a pain most of them could only endure once. Lena had learned to fight it—part of it. She'd never harmed Robert, her husband. She would let herself crumble to dust before she did that.

But, there were other times she hadn't been able to push back the murderous _need_ inside her. . . .

It wasn't just the hunt for life and youth that made her find her victims. It wasn't the horrible hunger that grew inside her as her time came—or not _just_ her hunger.

She was afraid for Robert. There had been times in the past that frightened her, times she had felt her control slipping, and those times became stronger and more frequent every five years.

Her victims weren't good men. Or so she told herself. She had tried to walk away from some of them, unable to go through with it. There had been some she _had_ walked away from.

The ones who died were the ones who wouldn't let her go.

She knew she was lying if she said that made it all right. They were hunting, but so was she. She'd be a hypocrite to blame them just because they were weaker monsters than the one they caught.

And some of them. . . . She wanted to think they were bad men, that the world wouldn't miss them (it wouldn't miss her). But, really, how much of a chance had she given them to prove what they would or wouldn't do?

Better them than Robert. That was the only thing she could say. Better that hunger overwhelm her when she was with them than with the man she loved.

Lena listened while a complicated explanation of fingerprinting was given. She didn't follow all of it, but some of it was simple enough. A print made by inking a finger and pressing it against paper was really a mirror of what appeared on a hand, the opposite of what would be shown if the finger itself were scanned. There were explanations about different ways to lift different kinds of prints and enter them into a database. They had to be able to "flip over" some of the prints on record to compare them properly to others. An incorrect setting would say a print was a match when, in fact, it was the mirror opposite. That was what had happened with the finger recovered at the crime scene.

"How is that possible?" the judge asked, getting to the heart of it. A mirror image had to be just as unlikely as someone else having an identical print, didn't it?

No, not exactly. Her lawyer brought out medical evidence and medical papers. Mirror twins, they were called. It was rare but documented. One twin had a cowlick on the left, the other on the right. One would be right-handed, the other left-handed. In rare cases, organs would be reversed. One twin might have heart and stomach on the right side, liver and the rest on the left.

And, sometimes, their fingerprints were mirror images of each other.

Lena showed her hands, four fingers and a thumb on one, four fingers and a thumb on the other.

The finger the police recovered from the crime scene matched the prints found at other murder sites. It didn't—except as a mirror image—match hers.

Her lawyer pointed out the obvious. She could not be the killer. The police had recovered a finger, one that was bitten off the murderer by the victim. That finger matched her DNA but it clearly wasn't hers.

It was like something out of a soap opera. The story was ridiculous and over the top on the face of it. Or maybe it seemed that way to Lena because she knew the truth. She knew there wasn't a lost twin out there and that she _had_ lost finger. But, maybe that was why they believed it. It was an insane story but it was the only one that matched the evidence.

Or the only one that matched it if you didn't believe Lena was an inhuman monster who could grow back a bit of hand that had been torn away—or didn't believe the calm, well-dressed man leaning on a cane had been able to change that finger so the prints no longer matched the one that had taken its place.

If you didn't believe that, then somewhere out there was a woman with a mirror image print of Lena's, a woman with the same DNA.

Lena's mother had been on her own when her daughter was born. Records were produced to back up what Lena had said about their finances and other difficulties. It was easy to believe her mother would have found twins overwhelming. There must have been a second child, one given up for adoption. Maybe she'd tracked Lena down. Maybe she'd found out about her by chance. For whatever reason, she decided to take revenge on the sister she'd never known. After all, woman who looked just like Lena had given the murder victim's watch to her husband, evidence tying her to the crime scene.

But, it was the story of how Lena had wound up on the boat where the police arrested her where Lena's lawyer really shone. Mr. Gold had demanded blood and urine samples from Lena be taken and examined. She didn't know what Gold was (and she didn't think she wanted to know) or how he managed to fake what the labs found, but the results were clear.

Lena noticed he never lied. He presented the evidence and pointed out what it showed. He never said she'd been drugged. He only showed that it was the only logical solution. The dose showing in the samples meant she would have been knocked out until shortly before the police arrived. Terror might have given her an adrenaline spurt when she woke up and saw men waving guns and shouting orders her mind wouldn't have been clear enough to understand, but she would have been out cold while the yacht's owner was wining and dining the woman he'd met.

It was unbelievable, Lena thought. She'd laugh at a TV show that tried a twist like this. But, it was what the evidence Gold had spun together (as skillfully as any spider web) said. Lena had been knocked out. While unconscious, she had been moved to the boat. A woman who looked like her had tried to seduce the man who owned it. When the police arrived, that woman left. Maybe she swam away, maybe she hid, maybe she had another way off. Gold didn't know. All that mattered was that Lena wasn't that woman.

When they took prints from the boat and from the wine glass Lena's almost-victim had given her, they were mirror images of hers.

Gold even brought in a jail attendant who described how awful Lena had looked after a while in her cell. "Like an old woman," she said. "Older than my grandmother."

Haggard appearance caused by drugs, Gold said. The judge nodded wisely. He'd seen enough hangovers and strung out junkies to understand that.

Lena had been afraid of Gold when he came smiling benignly to her cell and offered his deal. She didn't know what he was, but all her instincts said to get as far away from him as she could—not very far when she was locked up in a jail. She didn't think there was anything he could say to make her put her fate in his hands.

"Your daughter has _woged_ ," he told her, still smiling. "The Grimm saw her. Are you sure you wouldn't care to make a deal with me?"

Then, he had touched her lightly on the back of her wrist. Lena had watched as the wrinkled, crepe like skin thickened and smoothed, brown splotches disappearing.

"You don't have to kill," he told her gently, his words soft as spider silk. "And neither does your daughter." His eyes glinted with cold humor. "Unless you want to. To help a friend, perhaps."

So, she'd made a deal with him. Not because Robert was in jail as an accessory. Not because her daughter, Sally, was facing her change alone.

Because the Grimm knew. Sally might be only a child, but a Grimm would kill her without mercy.

Just as Sally would kill. Unless this man was telling the truth. Unless he could do something no one had ever been able to do for a _Spinnetod_ , stop her and still find a way for her to live.

The judge let her go. There may have been some doubts, but Mr. Gold assured her those would be taken care of soon. "They're going to find a body," he told her. "The death will be ruled a suicide, I think. A finger will be missing, and the DNA will match yours."

"Whose?" Lena asked.

"Oh, no one's really. Although, I might see about having the dental records match a woman I know. She might like to be legally dead, and then she'd owe me a favor. Her name is Lily. Lily and Lena, that works well don't you think?

"Now, we can see about you paying back what you owe me. . . ."


End file.
